LibGuides: HISTORY 121: World History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources on the Web

Numerous collections of primary sources have been digitized and made freely accessible on the Internet. As the topics for this course will be very broad, we cannot cover every place you might find a primary source in this guide. However, a few tips:

Newspapers are easy to use, and can allow you to easily pinpoint a date and location. They tell you what types of messages the public was receiving about an event or person, but can be very biased depending on the readership of the newspaper.
If you are writing about a particular country or countries, try looking in the National Archives of that country.
Use the references lists of the books and articles you are reading. If the author references a map or a certain report, ask a librarian to help you locate that map or report.
Primary sources may not tell us everything, and you should look underneath the surface - or think about the silences - to really understand their meaning. There are not very many firsthand accounts from marginalized groups that have been preserved, or they may have been left out of the records. Why? What does this tell us about how different identity groups are valued in societies? Consider WHO wrote the source and for PURPOSE.

World Digital Library
Access primary sources from over 190 countries. Search by time, place, topic, type of item, and more.
National Archives
Search foreign policy documents, war and military records, intelligence documents, and more.

Databases with Primary Source Content

The WSU Libraries have several databases that can be used to locate electronic primary sources. Here are some to consider:

Making of Modern World (Gale) This link opens in a new window
The Making of the Modern World provides full text and full page image access to books from 1450-1914, and pre-1906 serials. Covers economics, history, political science, sociology, and special emphasis on banking, finance, transportation, and manufacturing.
GALE Primary Sources
Artemis Primary Sources is a unified search system for these Gale primary source databases: Nineteenth Century US Newspapers, The Times of London (1785-2007), and Making of Modern World 1450-1850 and 1851-1914. Provides content discovery, term clustering, and term frequency tools
Early English Books Online (PQ)
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
American West
The American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago; primary source material on Westward Expansion
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America
American Indian Histories and Cultures: Sources from the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library, Chicago; a digitized collection providing insight into interactions between American Indians and Europeans from earliest contact up to civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century
Women and Social Movements, Modern Empires Since 1820
Explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this highly-curated archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Historical Newspaper and Periodical Collections

The Times (London, England) Digital Archive 1785-1985 (Gale)
The Times Digital Archive provides convenient access to an extraordinary library of back issues of this renowned newspaper online. By taking the microfilm collection of The Times (London) and producing a high-resolution digital format with searchable images, The Times Digital Archive represents unprecedented access to one of the most highly regarded resources for the study of 18th-century history and onward.
Economist (London, England: 1843)
Full text, PDF digital access to the Economist including full-color material (post-1997 and as available)
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers (Gale) This link opens in a new window
This database Provides access to approximately 500 U.S. newspapers, published between 1800 and 1900. Includes titles from throughout the United States, many published in what were, at the time, only territories. Papers selected cover a broad spectrum, with a comprehensive geographical and chronological range.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection
American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection provides digital access to a comprehensive collection of American periodicals and British periodicals published between 1684 and 1912. Subject coverage includes: advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, industry and professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more. Produced by a partnership between EBSCO and the American Antiquarian Society (AAS).
ProQuest Historical Newspapers. New York Times
The New York Times (1851-2006) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.
Chronicling America : Historic American Newspapers
Newspaper database that allows searching and retrieving the full-text of U.S. newspapers from 1836-1922.
Seattle Times (1896-1984) (Readex)
This database provides full text coverage of the Seattle Times, a major Northwest newspaper, from 1896 to 1984. Currently contains material back to 1900, including articles and advertisements.